Anti-capitalist climate activists block traffic into Burning Man: ‘f–king mess’By Melissa Koenig
August 28, 2023
Anti-capitalist climate activists blocked traffic into Burning Man on Sunday, causing a standstill spanning several miles on a major thoroughfare in Nevada — before rangers arrested them at gunpoint for “trespassing on tribal land.”
Videos posted online showed about half a dozen protesters from Seven Circles blocking a rural road using a trailer that they locked themselves onto, surrounded by banners reading “Burners of the World, Unite!,” “Abolish Capitalism” and “General Strike for Climate.”
The group says the protest was designed to draw attention to “capitalism’s inability to address climate’s ecological breakdown” and was meant as a protest against the “popularization of Burning Man among affluent people who do not live the stated values of Burning Man, resulting in the commodification of the event.”
Seven Circles specifically claims that the annual arts and counter-culture festival’s goal of being carbon-negative by 2030 is “insufficient to tackle the pressing crisis.”
It argues that Burning Man’s apolitical stance is “detrimental to its claimed values, especially as carbon emissions continue to rise despite government and corporate commitments to reduce carbon emissions by more than half by 2030.”
“We do not have a climate problem, the climate is behaving exactly in line with the laws of physics,” Thomas Diocano, co-founder of Rave Revolution, said in a statement. “We have an economic system problem, and that economic system is capitalism.
“History shows that capitalism cannot be reformed. It cannot be changed from the ‘inside.’ Are we really ready to sacrifice everything for an outdated, unequal economic system? The time to evolve has come.”
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2023/08/28/climate-activists-block-traffic-into-burning-man/
